Sony strikes back! Just a day after canning its CEO and president in part for letting the company fall so far behind Apple in the portable audio market it once dominated, the home electronics giant has just unveiled its latest plan to dig itself out from under the weight of a zillion unsold Network Walkman units and wrestle some sweet stuff back from the various iPods that descended on the market share pie like a swarm of shiny, personable locusts. Is it a futile attempt? Not hardly; this is Sony, after all, which is probably the one company that really can compete with Apple on a design footing. So while companies like Virgin Electronics are, according to an Engadget article pointed out by faithful viewer João, calling it quits (remember when its Virgin Player was supposed to be the product that would kill the iPod mini?), Sony has the design sense and the muscle to give the iPod family a run for its ever-growing piles of money-- assuming, of course, that the company ever figures out what customers actually want in a portable digital music player in the first place.

So what's the latest from Sony's digital music elves? Well, according to a Reuters article forwarded by faithful viewer Nick Zervas, it's a new line of cheaper flash-based players intended to throw some cold water on iPod shuffle fever before every man, woman, and child on this or any other planet has no fewer than six of the doohickeys clipped, strapped, or otherwise fastened to various body parts at any given time. Reportedly the cheapest configurations "will retail below 100 euros," a move that Sony hopes "will address complaints that its products are overpriced." Sure, it's a little disconcerting to see a premium brand like Sony going all budget-conscious with the price points, but hey, these are strange times; it's certainly no weirder than Apple introducing the Mac mini.

There's just one problem: if these cheaper Sony players are primarily intended to compete on price, Apple still comes out way ahead. Sony's cheapest new model costs the same as a 512 MB iPod shuffle, but only packs 256 MB of flash RAM; if you want as much storage from a Sony product as Apple's top-of-the-line €149 model, you'll have to shell out a whopping €90 more, because "the most expensive one-gigabyte model will go for about 240 euros"-- which, incidentally, is only slightly less than Apple charges for a 6 GB iPod mini. Oh, but Sony's still playing games with how many songs it says its players can hold, claiming that the 1 GB model "can store the equivalent of 45 compact discs." That's entirely true-- assuming that you typically listen to said compact discs over a baby monitor whose transmitter is positioned in front of your stereo's speakers four rooms away, since Sony is evidently assuming an "equivalent" 64 Kbps encoding bitrate. (Apple more honestly bills the 1 GB iPod shuffle as being able to hold 240 songs-- at 128 Kbps.)

To be fair, though, the Sony players do have screens (and very nice ones, apparently), which the shuffles do not, and they look pretty darn slick. Slick enough to put a noticeable dent in iPod shuffle sales? Obviously we won't know for sure until they ship later this month, but let's put it this way: given the price difference, the iPod's brand strength, and the fact that iPods aren't exactly butt-ugly themselves, we figure the Sony units would have to look like little naked ladies or something before they do any serious damage to iPod sales. Anyone taking bets?